Review

The Serpent’s Promise: The Bible Retold as Science by Steve Jones

T
his book claims to “revise” the Bible in the light of modern scientific
understanding. Drawing heavily on his native genetics, and more lightly on
other sciences, Steve Jones tackles such weighty Biblical themes as the
origin of life, sex, old age, natural disasters, disease, divine revelations
and morality. The idea seems to be to produce a Good News According to
Steve. It is, he modestly announces, six times shorter than the King James
version.

As you would expect, Jones — a genetics professor at UCL — is good on the
subject of ancestry. His first chapter explores how DNA sampling has
reshaped our understanding of the human family tree. He reveals, for
example, that up to 1% of European men are not the son of their supposed
father, and that a tenth of all marriages, worldwide, are between partners
closer than second cousins. On disease, he explains that we lived free of